AuthorTopic: Brand name cost me gigs (Read 11160 times)

Peavey's only sin was promoting themselves as a working mans product. By that I mean upper end MI quality available to the masses that may not be the prettiest looking, but rock solid from the day you bought it. That and a goofy looking logo. Peavey gear has always been rock solid, well designed, functional and nothing to be ashamed of. Additionally 95% of the hardware is designed and manufactured in the good ol' USA. (Mostly by rednecks, but I let that pass.) And the brand is 100 steps up from Behringer.

I can say at least the stuff made up to the late 90's have been good to me, can't say for the stuff now made in China as I've found better stuff to replace that's better quality, like going from the Peavey SP2Ti to Yamaha DSR.

I did sound for a concert several years back, backline rider stated "NO PEAVEY". So a nice bass amp was provided, can't remember the brand, but upper end gear. Sound check started and the bass amp was toast. Somebody drug an old peavey bass amp out of a closet, fired it up, worked great and the bassist never said a word about it!

I remember Hartley Peavey stating (when asked what amp he thought sounded the best) "The one that works".

It is amazing to me how often "professional brands" are given a "free pass" when they are acting up or such. I have heard it numerous times "yeah they do that sometimes"-but if there was a piece of Peavey or such gear that was working fine-somehow that is NOT acceptable?

But the pro gear that doesn't work is fine-as long as it is sitting in the rack?

I guess it is like some cars that are always in the shop are somehow better than one that simply works as intended day after day.

People can find excuses for all sorts of things-----

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A complex question is easily answered by a simple-easy to understand WRONG answer!

Peavey's only sin was promoting themselves as a working mans product. By that I mean upper end MI quality available to the masses that may not be the prettiest looking, but rock solid from the day you bought it. That and a goofy looking logo. Peavey gear has always been rock solid, well designed, functional and nothing to be ashamed of. Additionally 95% of the hardware is designed and manufactured in the good ol' USA. (Mostly by rednecks, but I let that pass.) And the brand is 100 steps up from Behringer.

Agreed

Logged

A complex question is easily answered by a simple-easy to understand WRONG answer!

Peavey's only sin was promoting themselves as a working mans product. By that I mean upper end MI quality available to the masses that may not be the prettiest looking, but rock solid from the day you bought it. That and a goofy looking logo. Peavey gear has always been rock solid, well designed, functional and nothing to be ashamed of. Additionally 95% of the hardware is designed and manufactured in the good ol' USA. (Mostly by rednecks, but I let that pass.) And the brand is 100 steps up from Behringer.

Peavey is generally considered to be the brand that broke the mold. They were the first to offer professional sound equipment at a price the average joe could afford. A lot of their bad press came from average joes buying peavey gear and then not knowing how to operate it. Peavey also instituted several methods of helping the average joe get away with an improper setup and operation, like their DDT compression. An interesting post by John Roberts blew an old peavey myth out of the water several years back. Someone had posted about peavey mixers being noisy. The older ones were. John Roberts replied that the preamps in the new peavey mixers were so quiet that it would cost $1000 per channel to reduce the noise floor half a DB. I think one of the reasons the "No Peavey" clause was in so many tech riders was to weed out lower end providers, kinda like when they'd spec a 40 channel mixer when they only needed 18 inputs.

I can say at least the stuff made up to the late 90's have been good to me, can't say for the stuff now made in China as I've found better stuff to replace that's better quality, like going from the Peavey SP2Ti to Yamaha DSR.

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This is another old theme... China=poorly built... With products built in China, just like anywhere else you get what you manage. If you use crap parts and lousy process control you get garbage out. If you use quality components and good process, the product is as good as built anywhere. I spent more time than I'd like in US Peavey factories and have visited Peavey's Chinese contact manufacturers (over 10 years ago now)..

I suspect Chinese manufacturing gets a bad reputation from small companies building products over there with poor documentation, and poor process control, and inadequate component specifications. Do you feel lucky?

It ultimately comes down to management, while small companies can not afford to have boots on the ground over there to handle the day to day issues that arise.

This is another old theme... China=poorly built... With products built in China, just like anywhere else you get what you manage. If you use crap parts and lousy process control you get garbage out. If you use quality components and good process, the product is as good as built anywhere. I spent more time than I'd like in US Peavey factories and have visited Peavey's Chinese contact manufacturers (over 10 years ago now)..

I suspect Chinese manufacturing gets a bad reputation from small companies building products over there with poor documentation, and poor process control, and inadequate component specifications. Do you feel lucky?

It ultimately comes down to management, while small companies can not afford to have boots on the ground over there to handle the day to day issues that arise.

JR

I worked as a machinist in a refinery for 38 years. I witnessed the transformation from everything being "made in the USA" to nothing "made in the USA". The last few years I worked saw chinese made tooling coming in. I was particularly impressed with large diameter drills made in China. They can make any quality the buyer demands. One of the reasons American manufacturers lost out was that they stopped caring about quality, and gave in to managers who sought to maximize profits at the expense of quality. Ball bearings are a good example. As far as I know, none are made in the USA any more.

To bring this back on topic, the difference between low-end and professional products is not so much the performance of the products as "features". Performance is often dominated by common standard parts used by many companies. These features are sometimes confused by the market place as indications of higher quality, but the reality is they indicate a customer willing to pay more for these higher end features in an otherwise similar product.

Sometimes new technology allows a value product to leapfrog ahead in feature content without the elevated price, like the new generation of digital consoles. Certainly superior "feature" content when compared to similar priced analog mixers.

Power amps (IMO) are becoming pretty much a commodity product, with the only features left to add are DSP for speaker management, but this will all become moot when powered speakers take over the world (as I predict). Then when they ask you what brand amps you use, you can answer nobody's.

There is an important lesson to be learned here. Previous posts have already spelled out what that is.

There is also an opportunity staring you in the face.

So many people in the business buy gear hoping they can find the business to pay for it. You have found business, all you need is the correct gear to get it. The decision you need to make is if the work available justifies the expense, and figuring that out should be easy math.

This is another old theme... China=poorly built... With products built in China, just like anywhere else you get what you manage. If you use crap parts and lousy process control you get garbage out. If you use quality components and good process, the product is as good as built anywhere. I spent more time than I'd like in US Peavey factories and have visited Peavey's Chinese contact manufacturers (over 10 years ago now)..

I suspect Chinese manufacturing gets a bad reputation from small companies building products over there with poor documentation, and poor process control, and inadequate component specifications. Do you feel lucky?

It ultimately comes down to management, while small companies can not afford to have boots on the ground over there to handle the day to day issues that arise.

Exactly. I am probably biased as I work for a Chinese company (actually a British company owned by an American company which is owned by a Chinese company).

China gets a bad reputation because most people see the very cheap, poorly made stuff and not the good stuff. The reason for this is obvious. It's why manufacturers go to China - to get things made as cheap as possible. As consumers we get what we ask for and not many people care about quality now, only price.

However, there are also some excellent manufacturing companies in China and if you set things up right with the correct supplies, manufacturing processes and quality control systems, it's possible to make good products for a reasonable price in China.

Bear in mind that a lot of the things people are saying about Chinese manufacture are precisely what was being said about Japanese manufacture several decades ago.

As far as Peavey are concerned, I have done a lot of shows with Peavey mixers, CS series amplifiers and as many SP2 and FH1 speaker we could get into the van. It wasn't top of the range equipment but it certainly worked well. I don't know why Peavey wasn't regarded very highly and in the 1980s and 1990s I disagreed with anyone who bad mouthed Peavey equipment as no one could give me an actual real life reason why it wasn't any good just because it had a Peavey logo on it.

I can use Peavey as an example of outsourcing manufacture to other countries too. Take the old XR600 mixer/amplifier. In it's time it was a great improvement on what was available here in the UK (WEM, Carlsbro, HH) and there are many of them still in use. My band has two, one of which gets gigged every weekend.

The XR600 series was replaced by the XR680 (and others which I can't remember). I suspect that the newer amps use cheaper components and are manufactured elsewhere such as China or Mexico (or England!) in order to make a competitive product. If Peavey wanted to make a profit on a US made XR600 today, I don't think we could afford it.